1. Field of the Invention The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for displaying web content, and in particular, to an apparatus and method for efficiently displaying web content on a mobile communication terminal having a limited screen size.
2. Description of the Related Art
In order for users to smoothly display web content on mobile communication terminals such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and a mobile phone, a screen size is small, for example, 320×240 pixels or 480×320 pixels, due to portability. To solve this problem, a zoom-in/out function is added to enlarge/reduce a specific area to be displayed.
However, even though the above-described zoom-in/out function is provided, it is not easy to select a desired portion, for example, a hyperlink element, using a finger on a touch-screen type mobile communication terminal. A portion around the finger on a screen may be covered with the finger.
Even though a zoom-in method for enlarging a specific area is used, it is difficult For the mobile communication terminal to determine a current position where the specific area is enlarged from the entire screen when the specific area is enlarged. Accordingly, since the mobile communication terminal displays only an enlarged area of the web content as the entire screen, a user may view only part of the web content and be inconvenienced in that he/she must return to a previous screen to select other content. That is, the user may view the previous screen when the screen is zoomed out a number of zoom-in times. There is inconvenience in use since the number and length of operations required for zoom-in/out are greater than those required for selecting content itself during web navigation.
As described above, the conventional zoom-in/out method has a problem in that it is difficult to use web content to be displayed as the number of links included in the web contents increases when a specific portion of the web contents is selected. Since it is difficult to separately extract and process only the specific portion of the web content, a need exists for a method for efficiently displaying web content on a mobile communication terminal.